3/20/22
One school year, I couldn't go a day without hearing my students say, "hashtag this" or "hashtag that". I had learned fairly early on in my career not to fight a fad, but instead, to embrace it. While it isn't as common these days to hear students announce a hashtag, hashtags themselves haven't gone out of style and this activity is still very popular with students.
While looking for ways to make fads or trends work in the classroom to support academics, I always start by considering the characteristics of the fad as it currently exists. Then I begin thinking about ways I can tweak what currently is, to make it work in my classroom.
Here's what I knew about hashtags at the time:
They were short.
In essence, they were a summary of a key idea.
They were most often used at the end of or within a social media post.
Considering these things, I thought hashtags would be a perfect way to identify key ideas at the end of a lesson. Thus the hashtag exit ticket was born.
How To:
Students create 3 hashtags for the content they learned in the lesson or unit. Hashtags can be no more than four words strung together with dashes (-) and they can't exceed 50 characters.
Ideas for Implementation:
Have several students share their hashtags with the class and explain how they relate to the lesson or unit to close the lesson.
Have students submit hashtags to a google form and as a class, identify and discuss the trends.
Display the hashtags created over the course of a unit on a bulletin board. Use the bulletin board to review key ideas from the unit before an assessment.
Use this activity as a hook for a lesson after the learning objective has been introduced. Students can write hashtags predicting what will be included in the lesson.
Present students with the hashtags half written, and ask them to finish the hashtag based on the content of the lesson.